Here’s the famous joke about country music.

What happens when you play a country record backward?  Answer: You get your wife back, your house back and your truck back.

Funny, yes, but more than funny it speaks to what’s at the heart of country music and why country is by far the most popular form of music radio. It’s consistency.

The music is consistent across generations, going back to the 1950s and before. The stars then--Hank Williams, Kitty Wells, Patsy Cline, Lefty Frizzell—are the legends of today, and listened to with a certain reverence by even the youngest fans. Similarly, older fans listen to and appreciate the hot new singers.

And they all listen to country radio.

“The success of the country radio format is that it has always been targeted at 35-44-year-old adults, right in the center of the 25-54 demographic,” explains Jaye Albright, who’s been advising country stations for 25 years as part of Albright and O’Malley Country Consulting.

Country radio embraces younger audiences who transition into the format and waves goodbye to older fans as they leave the target demographic.

The result is a format that consistently delivers a well-balanced mix of listeners: equal parts 25-34s, 35-44s and 45-54s with a nearly even split between men and women.

No other music format enjoys such consistency, certainly not rock, which is split by generations, with each generation in rebellion against the last.

The result is an advertiser-friendly audience but also an audience that’s only surpassed in size by news/talk with some 2,300 stations, just a few hundred behind news/talk.

Country is more than double the size of the third-largest format, adult contemporary.

Credit the music industry that is Nashville, and its brilliance at knowing its music, its fans and how to please them.

But country’s wide swath of listeners presents a unique challenge for programmers. That’s how to find the right balance between new singers and the old.

And therein lays the true irony of country radio. For all the reverence of the past, the competition for airtime is so intense that it’s that much harder for the established stars to stay on top.

With new talent constantly emerging, programmers must decide which older singers to let go as their fans age out of the station’s target.

That challenge has been around at least since Albright took her first country programming job in 1973.

“When I took over I was greeted by a ton of calls asking, ‘Where is Stonewall Jackson or Jack Green.’ At the time country was crossing over with artists like Buck Owens and Glenn Campbell so the older acts of the '50s and '60s were no longer being played.”

Similar cycles repeated approximately every 10 years until 1989 when a group of new artists including Garth Brooks, Reba McEntire, George Strait, and Alan Jackson burst onto the scene, pushing country radio’s popularity to new heights. 

But now the fans who championed the class of 1989 are 20 years older and the question of when those artists should move along, like Stonewall Jackson did in the early '70s, is looming large.

“They’ve lasted longer than any group in the history of country that I’ve been aware of,” Albright says. 

The key to it all, and what makes country also different from other formats, is that country radio isn’t about artists, it’s about songs.

“Any artist can have a hit if they pick a great song. That’s what’s cool about country,” she says.

But pick a bad song, even if you’re a big-name singer, and its chances of getting much play are slimmer than in other formats.

“There are no free passes for these artists. If an artist makes a truly awesome song as good as the stuff that got him here then we play it,” says Gregg Swedburg, program director of KEEY/Minneapolis. “But every time I play a mediocre song from an established artist it means I’m not playing somebody new who has a great song.”